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In Love and In Struggle: The Musical Legacy Of The Labor Bund

In libshaft un in gerangl(In Love and in Struggle)The Musical Legacy of the Jewish Labor BundYIVO, 1999

Inspired by the
January 1998 concert celebrating
the 100th anniversary of the Bund held in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, this CD features performances by The New
Yiddish Chorale, the Workmen’s Circle Chorus, soloists Adrienne Cooper and Dan
Rous, and conductor and accompanist
Zalmen Mlotek. Songs range from Yiddish poems to an English language “Ballad of
the Triangle Fire.”

This CD also includes a poignant
rendition of “Rampage, Rampage, Raging Winds!”,“Bread and Roses,” the “Youth Anthem” from the Vilna Ghetto, and
“Vilne”, the paean to the Bund’s home city of Vilna, among others. There are workers’ songs
of exploitation and struggle, cries of protest combined with exhortations of
hope, poems by David Edelshtat, I. L. Peretz and Abraham Reisen, songs calling
for human liberty and dignity. These songs were popular on both sides of the
Atlantic in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Producer Donna Gallers dedicated the recording to
her grandparents, Brucha and Dr. Emanuel Platt, activists in the Youth Movement
of the Bund in Poland. For conductor
Zalmen Mlotek the songs hold an extra personal meaning: they were sung in his
home when he was growing up and at Camp Hemshekh, the Bund-sponsored summer
camp that he attended.

Edelshtadt's Arbeter-froyen addresses women in its protest of the
hardships of factory work. The song sounds a call to oppressed women
workers to join the labor movement in its fight for justice and
equality. Published in the New York newspaper Freie Arbeiter Stimme (Free Voice of Labor) in 1891, it was also sung by striking workers in Russia and Poland.

Vilna poet and partisan Szmerke Kaczerginski wrote this stirring
march song for the youth movement in the Vilna ghetto. Many of the
young people who took part in the ghetto's active resistance movement
later also became combatants in the partisan units that fought the
Nazis in the forests.